This should help:
https://caltopo.com/m/161H
So anyway, I started at Switzer's. Had to park on the ACH because I showed up late and there was no more room at the bottom. The flow in the Arroyo is just a trickle. There're some standing pools and SOME flow in a few places, but not very much; it's quite sad. When the Gabrielino climbs to bypass the falls, I was looking at a group of bros across the channel. They were standing on what looked like a building foundation. I assumed this is where the chapel stood. The ridge above looked climbable, and I made a mental note to check that out at a later date as another potential approach to Mt. Disappointment.
I arrived at the Little Bear Canyon junction. Looks like this:
The Arroyo Seco flows from the bottom of the photo, to the right. This view looks straight into the mouth of Little Bear Canyon. Alright, so I entered, and immediately hit two waterfalls that needed bypassing. I think I went around both of these on the right. I should also mention that the flow here was much more robust than in the Arroyo proper.
This is like El Prieto: it's a narrow canyon with lots of not-super-high-but-high-enough waterfalls and lots of brush, both live and dead. Maybe not as waterfally as El Prieto, but plenty brushy. In open areas there'd be a use trail sometimes, but there aren't a ton of those.
I walked past this tree:
Are the scratch marks from climbing bears? They went pretty high. Oh yeah, eye on the prize. I kept pushing, but the progress was very slow.
It quickly became apparent that there was no way to complete the full loop before dark, so I needed to either backtrack, or to find another way back. At one point I was climbing a line on the left (to bypass some brushy mess no doubt) that just kept going. Soon I topped out at a minor ridge, looking at a tributary of Little Bear Canyon on the other side. This was smaller than LBC, and received less flow. Thus it was less brush-choked, and it looked like walking in that drainage would produce faster progress. And for a while it did. But soon even that acquired cascades (dry ones) and brush.
I then found an animal track up the ridge on the left, and took that up. This minor ridge was significantly more clear. It had burned semi-recently, and there were deer tracks on it, so I could make good progress there. A thought was to take this to the main ridge, go right, and take THAT to Mt. Disappointment, but I really didn't like how late it was already. So I decided instead to descend the main ridge down to where I saw the bros earlier, the chapel site (I think). The view of Little Bear Canyon from higher up:
Yep. It's a mess. Looking forward, the terrain promised lots of progress.
I jumped off my ridge to the left to contour around this sub-ridge:
This guy doesn't go down to the chapel, but rather to where Little Bear Canyon starts (so says the map at least). Once on the other side of that, I could see my target ridge:
I'm aiming for the flat saddle. The switchback on the left is the Gabrielino bypasss of Royal Gorge. The traverse to get to my saddle looked like too much steep, solid rock
So I found another gully, dropped down
And would climb up to the saddle from below. Looking back on THIS gully:
Once I left LBC, the terrain was brushy, but much more reasonable than in the canyon, thanks primarily to animal tracks. Yep, they're here
I made it to my saddle. From there you could see the top of Royal Gorge, the power towers above Gould Mesa, the radio tower behind the Hollywood sign, and the Downtown LA towers.
It turned out that I picked the correct ridge, in the sense that it deposited me at the Gabrielino above the waterfalls. I never did find the foundations. It could be that I took the wrong deer trail near the bottom, and narrowly missed it. Anyway. If somebody wants to try out one of these approaches, ping me and I'll try to wake up earlier.
